CONTAINS

Hoberman’s venture mydeco.com. In March 2009 she was appointed as the government’s digital inclusion champion, a post she kept until November 2013. In 2012 she launched the digital charity Go ON UK and in 2013 she joined the House of Lords as Baroness Lane Fox of Soho. Hoberman left...

...years in the red. Mydeco.com will begin selling and delivering goods directly from independent boutiques in an attempt to target “the John Lewis shopper”. Until now Mydeco, which was set up by Brent Hoberman, has acted as an aggregator — helping customers to search products from 1,500...

...of lastminute.com, the real British start-up incubator could be emerging in a shabby building in Notting Hill. Brent Hoberman has moved mydeco, his latest venture, to the top floor. “There’s ten start-ups in here. It’s Silicon Hill!” exclaims the 42-year old posterchild of the last tech...

...before committing? Mydeco.com’s 3-D room planner is a free service that lets you start with a blank canvas in the precise shape of your room, add any kind of flooring and wall covering, then furnish it with homewares on sale on the site, or upload your own snaps. As much fun as playing...

...nominations The mydeco/The Times YourSpace campaign is all about giving people in local communities across Britain a voice, and an opportunity to improve a space that is important to their local community. Whether it’s a doctor’s waiting room that could use a makeover, a youth club that...

When I bought my two-bedroom flat in southwest London four years ago, its white walls, neutral carpets and basic but functional kitchen meant I could move in pretty much straightaway. Bar buying the odd bit of Ikea furniture, I did nothing to the place. Now, though, the moth-infested carpet...

...we can arrive at a warehouse to traipse round in the hope of finding a suitable sofa. The star of the dot-com boom has dreamed up mydeco.com, a website that will allow homemakers, DIY enthusiasts and interior designers to view every armchair that the high street has to offer from the...

Remember when mydeco.com launched four years ago? It was the brainchild of Brent Hoberman, who had previously launched lastminute.com, and the interiors world went crazy with anticipation. With a 3-D program that would allow you to drag and drop homewares into a virtual room, and, as a...

...to scooters. But what Brent Hoberman didn’t count on when he invited Conran and Starck to their first joint meeting as board members of mydeco.com – his new online furniture and interior design site – was the size of their personalities. Watching the three self-made multimillionaires...

When Mike Coppack decided to enter Powis Hall into the Times/ mydeco YourSpace competition, it wasn’t with the aim of winning. “We thought that we didn’t have a cat in hell’s chance,” says Coppack, who runs one of 30 stalls in the 80-sq-ft indoor market place. “I popped the nomination in...

Ladies who never lunch are the new target market for online homeware retailers. Working women who are chronically short of time, and who eat sushi or an Innocent Veg Pot at their desks at lunchtime, have fuelled the growth of online clothing stores, such as Asos.com and Net-a-Porter.com. Now...

...is launching mydeco.com, which will showcase more than a million items from independent retailers and some of the biggest names on the high street, including John Lewis and Argos. Mr Hoberman, who will be the executive chairman, told The Times: “We are going to change the way you design...

...sad old bastard when you start thinking about what you have done. The future is more interesting,” he has said. And so he has just launched Mydeco.com, which began when he was decorating his Kensington house with Genevieve, who is an interior designer. “She’d give me drawings and swatches...

Made designer export_Ooyala H264.mp4 When it was launched in March 2010, Made.com promised to revolutionise the furniture trade. “The industry was in need of being disrupted,” says the firm’s chairman, the online entrepreneur Brent Hoberman. “I’d seen how it was quite inefficient, and was...

How to paint a chair.mp4 You’ve done it. After scraping together every spare penny for a deposit, stamp duty and all those fees, you have the keys to your first home. Trouble is, it’s empty — so how do you furnish it on a budget of next to nothing? When I moved into my first home, I had a...

Brent Hoberman is in an excitable mood. “I was fired from my first job for being a prima donna,” he says, swinging back and forth on his chair like the naughty child in a classroom. “I was pretty pissed off with the bosses, so I organised a party for a few hundred people and gave their...

...carried out by the British designers Sir Terence Conran and Tara Bernerd. Over the past month, the YourSpace competition, run jointly with mydeco.com, has received nearly 200 nominations, ranging from Scout huts to park pavilions, hospital waiting rooms and even the odd police station. At...

Hoberman and Martha Lane Fox, have teamed up again to form a new business. Hoberman has already spent several months recruiting a team for Mydeco.com, which aims to help people decorate their homes. He said it would help customers “make the right choices and get taste validation...

Yoo is a company owned by John Hitchcox, the well-connected developer who is a regular fixture of the Tatler diary pages. In the Nineties, Hitchcox made his name by bringing New York-style loft-living to London; in the Noughties he moved on to a countryside venture near Lechlade in...

...are eaten in the kitchen. We are therefore investing more thought and effort in our choice of kitchen furniture. The homewares website mydeco.com reports that the number of searches for kitchen chairs has risen by 489 per cent since August, compared with the same period last year. Kitchen...

Five years ago, they were thought of as hobbyists with too much time on their hands and an unhealthy fascination with upholstery fabrics; now the interiors bloggers and tweeters are being taken seriously by the interior-design industry and amateur home improvers alike. Their addictive feed of...

...known as Spark Ventures and is chaired by Tom Teichman, a founder-investor in lastminute.com. Among the assets it still owns is a stake in Mydeco.com, the latest venture of Brent Hoberman and Martha Lane Fox. The directors of AIM-quoted Spark want to take it private. Other shareholders...

If you haven’t had the chance to book a summer getaway yet, or you don’t plan to budget for a big trip this year, there are still plenty of ways to travel the world — from the comfort of your own armchair. Every spring, homewares inspired by the far-flung and fabulous abound, but this year...

The popularity of The Artist, an unlikely blockbuster movie, has created an equally unlikely star. I’m referring not to Uggie the wonder dog, but to the glamorous, flapper-era furnishings that made a loud statement in every silent scene. The trend is likely to intensify throughout the year...